Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Wednesday October 24, 2012 @09:11AM
from the computer-time-is-over-billy dept.

Dupple writes "During last week's test, a CHAMP (Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project) missile successfully disabled its target by firing high power microwaves into a building filled with computers and other electronics. 'On Oct. 16th at 10:32 a.m. MST a Boeing Phantom Works team along with members from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Directed Energy Directorate team, and Raytheon Ktech, suppliers of the High Power Microwave source, huddled in a conference room at Hill Air Force Base and watched the history making test unfold on a television monitor. CHAMP approached its first target and fired a burst of High Power Microwaves at a two story building built on the test range. Inside rows of personal computers and electrical systems were turned on to gauge the effects of the powerful radio waves. Seconds later the PC monitors went dark and cheers erupted in the conference room. CHAMP had successfully knocked out the computer and electrical systems in the target building. Even the television cameras set up to record the test were knocked off line without collateral damage.'"

Excuse my ignorance on this one, but if the missile disrupts electrical systems, how is a Faraday cage going to help? Assuming that your generation is not self contained, would such a disruption take out the electrical system outside of the Faraday cage? And if there is a sufficient spike, still do damage to devices inside the cage? Yea, I imagine with sufficient surge protection and battery backup you might be able to withstand the attack, but in all seriousness, only a really hardened target would have a chance. In the era of asymmetric warfare, the U.S. would be unlikely to face an enemy with this type of planning and resources. And if it were symmetric conflict, I doubt the United States would be worried about such a target attack. Instead they would cripple infrastructure or simply take out the building.

The more likely use case would be conducting a targeted raid and using a weapon like this to ensure that all security systems and communications systems were disabled right before the raid. Think Bin Laden compound.

The even more likely scenario is that this is a way of making some companies very rich and this weapon will never see use.

>Excuse my ignorance on this one, but if the missile disrupts electrical systems, how is a Faraday cage going to help?

The microwaves doesn't cause sufficient voltage spikes in the electrical power going into the building - that takes an EMP to happen. The microwaves causes voltage surges at the junction level in the microelectronics in the machine itself, where the threshold for a "fry" is much lower.

A faraday cage, like the one that keeps you from being irradiated with 1.5kW of radio waves as you stand in front of your microwave oven waiting for the popcorn, would be sufficient to keep the electronics inside the building working. Either build a room or shield the whole building with mesh.

Can you comment on the summary and article's claim that it had taken electrical systems off line? I seriously don't understand the mechanics behind all of this and would like to understand a little bit more.

Or own a house with aluminum siding with aluminum screens on aluminum storm window retrofits. anyone that has lived in this typical house in the urburbs will tell you that it's highly effective at keeping out attacks like this, as well as Cellular service.

I'm sure it works great against any kind of wired equipment (as the leads work as great antennas to pick up the pulse), but what of those fancy laptops with aluminum cases? Cell phones, especially if off? You'd think that people who are important enough for the government to go after them with something like this would be aware of it and harden their communications against it. If you're unsophisticated enough to be susceptible to this you're probably not enough of a threat to warrant its use.

The problem is... Faraday cages aren't a magic wand. Real world Faraday cages aren't like the little screened off sheds thingies you see on Mythbusters.

Real world Faraday cages have power coming into them. And HVAC systems controlling the environment inside. And communications between the equipment inside and the world outside. And doors for the occupants to enter and leave by... And all of these things can potentially allow RF energy into the "protected" volume, if they don't invalidate the protectio

I think you're confusing "interferes with" which merely requires ruining the signal to noise ratio by enough that you can't demod without errors, with vaporizes.

You're talking about a temporary impairment, they're talking about the equivalent of putting your bluetooth gear in the microwave and turning it on until smoke is emitted.

Or another analogy is the geometry of sunlight on my deck railings makes shadows aka ugly black bars on the deck, but that's a far cry from using a giant magnifying glass to burn permanent ugly black bars into my deck.

Further investigation will likely explain this better, but two possibilities are: Your microwave is slightly defective, or the interference is actually coming from the power cord, which the microwave is parasitically coupled to as an antenna. All sorts of electronics introduce noise on the power lines in your house, that's why they make fancy surge protectors with "filtered" outlets that reduce said noise from entering other devices.

Says someone that knows nothing about RF or how a faraday cage works....

It will be highly effective at preventing this. and if you use a pair of ethernet to fiber transceivers to make a copper air gap, you can have connectivity inside that cage that will not drag the energy in.

and getting power filters to filter incoming power is trivial as well. Stopping spikes coming in on electrical power lines is actually really easy.

On the one hand I love reading about science stories. On the other, I am frankly tired of spending billions of dollars to prove the US has the biggest penis. Please cut our military spending 50 percent, focus on diplomacy and better targeted aid. Fund alternative energy to reduce our reliance on dictatorships.

I think this is a pretty good use of our military budget. It knocks out enemy electronics without collateral damage. If it hits the wrong target, no civilian casualties. Granted, it's not too difficult to shield against, but that costs a fair bit of money and not everyplace can easily be shielded. If you can take out enemy electronics, you can effectively kill their communications and even a good portion of their mobility... which are probably the two most important elements in any conflict.

I dunno what frequency they are using exactly, but microwave radiation doesn't penetrate very deep into human skin, so it might not do any damage at all. And it's focused, so they can avoid planes and hospitals. And cars don't automatically crash if the electronics fail, thats the reason EMP is used against fleeing vehicles.

Like, for example, more people with a basic education and some critical thinking skills. All the really good stuff comes easily afer that, everywhere it happens.

The problem is that there are organizations dedicated to preventing that from happening. You know, marching into a school, dragging the teacher out into the town square, and shooting her in the head for... teaching. Especially for teaching girls how to read and write. So, you know those guys, half a dozen of them riding around in the back of a pickup truck with AK47s? They need to be stopped from killing people who want to do things like read, write, and have a rational government with little things like constitutions and the rule of law. And guess what! Sometimes you have to use actual force to shut those guys down.

Now, clearly you don't like the idea of surgical strikes, drones, etc., because you'd rather deal with guys like that and the camps where they gather by sending in a column of troops, armor, supply chains, and doing it all with on-the-ground firefights. Because, presumably, you'd like those guys to have lots of warning that the troops are coming, and you think that ground combat involves an acceptable (to you) number of casualties on the part of those defending the schools, and an acceptable amount of carnage and destruction from urban street-level combat. Why you'd rather have all of that mayhem and death and civilians-in-the-crossfire stuff instead of using modern technology to minimize it is a bit of a mystery. But I'm sure it all starts with your obsession with "you guys" instead of with girls who want to be educated.

Before you start squawking about an electrical failure, Nissan says the steering wheel is connected to the rack through an emergency clutch, allowing the driver to retain control if something goes kablooey.

Even in goatherder country, you find a fair amount of electronics for communications. Bonus: they're usually older models with even less shielding.

In modern countries, how many buildings are shielded with a Faraday cage? Nuke bunkers, sensitive control centers, not much else. While hitting the brain would be ideal, it's still a pretty good strategy to take out all of the supporting infrastructure and would be too costly to shield everything.

I would not be surprised to learn that all the back covers where removed from the PCs in this test and/or that all they managed to do was trigger the GFCI circuits that they put in for that very purpose.

the hawks have had too good a time for too long. and we have all suffered due to the fact that there is limited funding and the asshole military leaders keep taking MORE than their fair share of the nation's wealth.

I'm tired of this bullshit spending!

cut it 50%. cut it 80%.

put the money back in the us where our own infrastructure is rotting away before our very eyes!

you know, money can work as well (or better) for peacetime things, too.

Except you don't really know Application Y at the beginning. It's usually developed afterword when people are sitting around going: We have this great technology, what else can we do with it.It's a focused RnD. Often int Project X produces application A,B,C and D.

The military doesn't build these things. Companies do. So it's not like the money is put into a pile and lit on fire. It circulates; which is key to a health economy.

Not so much "could we", but "would we". Defense is a great motivator. It also motivates in a certain direction, and to an extent, a desperate abandon, we wouldn't see elsewhere. The desperate abandon is the interesting point - gets us to try things we wouldn't have considered before.

I doubt anyone can say which is better, just that the different methods are... different.

More likely the fail mode will be something like they don't like videos uploaded to youtube of them beating up minorities, so every time they arrest someone they blast everyone in the area... Innocent bystander has a pacemaker? Too bad so sad what are you supporting the terrorists because if your not with us you're against us

So, the bad guys (junior grade) have to go out and buy aluminum foil to shield their gear.

The bad guys, senior grade, are worried about Tempest and already have shielding. (Note - if a missile can knock your monitor out, and that is a worry to you, you should also assume that a drone can pick up what the monitor is displaying.)

Every idiot that has to use real-world materials on hand, instead of perfect circles of aluminum.

I stand by my original statement. In the real world, out of the lab, it's hard to make a perfect Faraday cage that's useful. Things like doors, and power conduits mess up its integrity, would allow in some of the signal that might be enough to fry your electronics.

Simply building your special room 3 floors undergound would probably attenuate the signal enough, but there are other missiles that address th

...with antennas to remotely disable machines. I've known people make them. However the issue was that 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). As such I don't think this will ever be used in anything other than a war setting, and even then, if you're going to cook the occupants to death, you might as well hit them with a conventional explosive, probably a nicer way to go.

TFA doesn't mention which microwaves they use, perhaps they other other ones which do not affect humans so much.

...with antennas to remotely disable machines. I've known people make them. However the issue was that 2.4GHz* would cause people to go blind if you hit them with it (due to the clear liquid in your eyes turning milky). As such I don't think this will ever be used in anything other than a war setting, and even then, if you're going to cook the occupants to death, you might as well hit them with a conventional explosive, probably a nicer way to go.

TFA doesn't mention which microwaves they use, perhaps they other other ones which do not affect humans so much.

The burden placed on the enemy of caring for the suddenly disabled is considered part of warfare and is in fact more damaging to the enemy than simply killing them.
War is ugly.

My understanding - and I am not an expert either - is that it prohibits weapons that are *intended* to cause blindness. It doesn't prohibit weapons which may cause blindness incidentially to their intended purpose, and this has come up in the past with regards to laser-guided missiles where the very high-powered targeting laser can be easily pointed into the enemy eyes to disable them while the missile closes.

So what they've basically done is created a missile that does the same thing as my cat -- disables computer systems. Though since my cat is not available for deployment in a combat zone, I think the missile is the way to go.

Seriously? Of all the Crap reality TV on, these are the ones you chose to make your point? Those two are way down the priority list from, for example #27 Real Housewives, #13 swamp people, and of course #1 Jersey Shore. But don't worry, mission planning proceeds apace.

It's interesting that it can disable multiple targets, I wonder what the power requirements are. I figured the missile would detonate near the target and use the energy of the explosion to somehow how generate targeted microwaves like a shaped charge energy weapon more or less. It's on a missile because missiles are fast but I bet we see the same setup installed on drones in the near future.

I love how the U.S. military keeps inventing weapon systems that are far more effectively used against us than against the sorts of enemies we face these days. Sure, we get a few year's worth of lead time where we're the only one in possession of the new toys but once it's been invented, it's just a matter of time until everyone has it. Tell, me, who has more to lose from the wide availability of this sort of missile system? The people with the heaviest reliance on computers, of course. Same goes for Stuxnet, of course, except that was even worse because that weapon system delivers its own blueprint. Thanks, guys.

FYI in the 1950s and 60s military radar operators in Canada, Alaska and Greenland would stand in front of their radar dishes as it was the only place on the base where they could get warm even for a second. It was discouraged as it cut down the signal.

They don't have particularly bad medical outcomes. Most have been tracked.

Tin foil? Everything now is ALUMINUM foil, which does nothing to block government waves! They haven't made TIN foil since WWII. Oh they SAY it was because they needed the tin for the war effort, but the truth is they discovered tin was the only effective shield against their new toys so they made sure nobody could get it anymore!

Nobody uses tin for anything because it's rubbish. Also Aluminium was used heavily in and following the war for aircraft production...

The war was great for Alcoa. They sold aluminum to Japan before (and during) the war and it was turned into Zeroes which were then used to attack American planes and ships which used their aluminum, too. Win-win.

No need to shield the cables against this. Microwaves won't cause resonance in circuit larger than the micro- scale (hence the name microwaves - the wavelengths are teensy). It's the microwaves getting into the IC's and interconnects that would be the problem, so you only need to shield the computer itself. Much less expensive that way, and you can leave the (cheap) peripherals unprotected and just swap them out from a (presumably shielded) storage closet.

how are you supposed to record electromagnetic radiation when you are shielding against electromagnetic radiation? (optical filters and/or faraday cage?)

Waveguides are excellent high pass filters with great ultimate attenuation. If you don't believe me, do two experiments and look down the center of a straight section, and then wave a 9-volt battery on one end and a voltmeter on the other. I can't be bothered to look up circ waveguide cutoff freqs vs a standard c-mount inner diameter, but right off the top of my head a cmount hole is probably small enough to stick inside a piece of rectangular WR-42 waveguide so just tune your master blaster missile to somewhere lower than 25 or so GHz and the attenuation thru a cmount is likely to exceed 100 dB or so. Best ask a EE to model it to make sure you haven't built a coupling iris instead of a waveguide. In fact put a tiny little CCD with a pinhole lens in a small metal box that is way too small to resonate at the master blaster freq. Talk to an optician about designing the longest narrowest possible lens system aka a submarine periscope and make the tube outta metal aka a long narrow circ waveguide operating way below cutoff.